"So people sat at home, at their computers, refreshing the screen again and again, to find out if they still had an income while bleating out their anger and terrors on a private newspaper chat group. Two writers reported they got the shaft while breastfeeding their newborns, dripping tears onto their faces. Someone included contacts for suicide prevention."
Things can die in darkness, for sure.
"It’s hard to be in Washington DC at this moment and react to anything except the devastating news that Jeff Bezos, with more than $250 billion at his personal disposal, and Will Lewis, the discredited Murdoch/Fleet Street refugee Bezos brought in to run (and ruin) the Washington Post, have today announced what is effectively the Post’s demise.:
~ James Fallows
#WashingtonPost #JeffBezos #WillLewis #Trump
/3
https://fallows.substack.com/p/management-under-a-mad-king-the-courtiers
"Most of the obituaries will blame environmental changes of technology and news consumption. These changes are real, but they are not why the Post is now in hospice.
No, this is a story about incompetent leadership that destroyed the paper’s economic viability. It’s a story of self-mutilation."
~ Jonathan V. Last
#WashingtonPost #JeffBezos #WillLewis #Trump
/4
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-washington-post-dies-in-broad-daylight-bezos-lewis-layoffs
"A man like Jeff Bezos does not do anything because he has to. It has been decades since he was constrained by anything other than his own desires. What happened to the Washington Post over the last three years happened for one reason and one reason only: Because Jeff Bezos wanted it to be so.
Because he gets off on civic vandalism."
"Let’s be clear about what this really is. This is not restructuring. This is not belt-tightening. This is not a difficult but necessary business decision.
This is capitulation to authoritarianism.
While journalists were being purged from The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos chose to spend approximately $75 million funding a movie about Melania Trump."
~ Ben Meiselas
#WashingtonPost #JeffBezos #WillLewis #Trump
/6
https://www.meidasplus.com/p/a-letter-to-jeff-bezos-and-the-washington
"The layoffs are solely the responsibility of inept, incompetent, and inattentive ownership and management. It inherited a great American paper and left it in the rubble, putting hundreds of talented journalists out on the street."
~ Jennifer Rubin
